Charlemagne

Alain Madelin, failing for France

Why don't French voters like economic liberals or libertarians?

THATCHERITE, economic liberal, free-marketeer: in George Bush's America, even in Tony Blair's Britain, these are labels many politicians wear proudly. But France is exceptional: a country of solidarité, where producer counts as much as consumer, worker as much as customer. As Edouard Balladur, a former prime minister of the centre-right, once explained, free markets work by “the law of the jungle, the law of nature”; civilisation's function is to “struggle against nature”.

Hence France's funny arithmetic this week. The Socialist-led government sent three ministers to that annual jamboree of globalisation, the World Economic Forum, this time in New York rather than Davos, where it usually gathers. But six other, albeit more junior, ministers, along with two senior Socialists and a trio of presidential hopefuls, trooped off to the counter-globalisation summit in Brazil's Porto Alegre. So, it should be noted, did a clutch of right-wing politicians. In short, ambitious French politicians, whatever their ideological hue, do not seek the “Anglo-Saxon” labels that attach to the free market; they shun them.

Except, that is, Alain Madelin, the 55-year-old leader of the Liberal Democracy party. He imagines himself as France's next president—the contest's first round is on April 21st—and is willing to endure all the ordeals this fantasy involves: ghastly “dinner-debates” in endless small towns, appearances on every possible television chat-show, instant quotes for every idiot journalist.

All for what? Mr Madelin will be lucky to get 5% of the vote in round one. In September, when he sought to rally his supporters in Tournus, he drew a crowd of 700 activists. The same day Jean-Pierre Chevènement, leader of the left-wing Citizens' Movement and once the interior minister in Lionel Jospin's current coalition government, launched his own presidential campaign before a throng of over 5,000. So why on earth is Mr Madelin, three times a minister in conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s, intent on inevitable humiliation?

The first answer is the politician's cliché: “I'm running to win.” Then comes the realistic rider: “Or to make the best score possible. I'm not in politics to be a minister but to carry out ideas.” Of course, the one does not exclude the other: as minister of industry in Jacques Chirac's conservative government of the late 1980s (“cohabiting”, thanks to the electors' whim, with a Socialist president, François Mitterrand), Mr Madelin first cut his ministry's budget, then hailed an industrial revival.

But ministerial duties and ideas do not always go happily together: as trade minister in the Balladur government of 1993-95, Mr Madelin constantly jibbed at the government's refusal to let the franc fall, correctly predicting a recession. And when he was appointed Alain Juppé's minister of finance in 1995 he lasted a mere three months, accusing his prime minister of being “maladroit” in trying to enact the liberalising reforms they had earlier both agreed on. The Madelin view is that he would have managed the reforms a lot better. “I know how to deal.”

Maybe. Mr Juppé is the sort of egg-head énarque—a graduate of the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration—who for the average voter epitomises unfeeling remoteness. By contrast, Mr Madelin, a Renault factory worker's boy, can claim to be a man of the people. He spent his schooldays learning how to bash metal before deciding to get a law degree. Is that why, when students from posher backgrounds (witness Lionel Jospin, the Socialist prime minister and presumed presidential candidate) studied Trotsky, the young Madelin flirted with the populist far right? Is it why, when the left was enthusing over Algeria's independence, the teenage Madelin was protesting at France's abandonment of the Harkis, those Algerians who had sided with France. The explanation is curt: “I was dead against the Communists.”

Lonely libertarian

Why? Candidate Madelin says he passionately opposes any form of totalitarianism, left or right, so would “surely in 1940 have fought against Nazi totalitarianism and the Vichy regime.” His is the response of an instinctive libertarian: “Give a man back his liberty and responsibility. Give him the chance to blossom and succeed.” Last summer Mr Madelin was the guest speaker at the 200th birthday celebrations of a previous French libertarian, Frédéric Bastiat. Just like today's Mr Madelin, Bastiat railed against the absurdities of protectionism and the interfering stupidity of the state, satirically proposing in parliament that the government should protect France's candlemakers from the “ruinous competition of a foreign rival”—namely, the sun.

Unhappily for Mr Madelin, few Frenchmen have read Bastiat. Modern France's instinct is to look back not to Bastiat's liberalism but to the 17th-century protectionism of Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister. Mr Madelin calls for “a new France”. He vows to free the schools from the rigid hand of the state; to reform the judicial system with more police and kinder prisons; to simplify taxes and cut income tax to a maximum of 33%; to devolve power not just to troubled Corsica but to all France's regions; to let French workers retire at the age they want, with a better choice of pension; and to let workers shelter part of their taxable income, as in America, with donations to charity. “The new France is for me a France that asks a little less of the state and puts a little more trust in the French.”

Will the French respond, entrusting their future to President Madelin? Of course not. They prefer to forget how much globalisation has benefited them: France is, after all, the world's sixth-biggest foreign trader. Instead, they laud the “peasant” leader José Bové, swallowing his line that McDonalds and Rocquefort cannot coexist. The politicians then follow where the voters lead. If Mr Madelin is to persuade his countrymen to think otherwise, he had better hope that President Jacques Chirac wins a second term, and makes him once again a minister—or at least listens to his ideas.